Presently, many organizations require employees and contractors to capture time that they have worked on a particular task, shift, job, department, role, assignment, project, etc. (the list is not exhaustive). The employer typically processes the time worked to determine, for example, how much to pay the employee or contractor, how much to bill a customer for whom the work has been conducted, how much direct and or indirect cost should be attributed to a task, cost-center or project, etc. Whatever the reason, organizations need to receive accurate and timely capture of time information from their employees and contractors.
Current workforce management systems such as time and attendance systems and/or time and labor systems can be used to capture the time an employee has worked. The systems work by either the employee logging into the self-service workforce management system and creating entries in an online timecard themselves, or by the employee/contractor submitting a paper timecard to a timekeeper who enters the time into the workforce management system on behalf of the individual. Whichever the case may be, creating timecard entries is time-consuming and thus any improvement in efficiency to reduce the time taken for the entry of the time will result in direct productivity gains for the workforce and ultimately save the organization money.
To illustrate the costs involved and potential savings, for example, if an organization has 10,000 employees required to enter their time on a weekly basis, and each timecard takes, on average, five minutes to enter, then annually the time taken to enter the timecards for the organization is 10,000×52 weeks×5 minutes=2,600,000 minutes (or 43,333 hours). If the average wage for the employees is 10 dollars per hour that would equate to a direct cost of $433,333 dollars per year for entering in timecards. Consequently, any time that can be saved on entering the employees' time would result in a cost saving for the organization.
For example, if it were possible to cut the time to enter timecards by 50%, then in the example above that could translate to a $216,666 saving per year. Likewise, for organizations with more employees, or more complex timecards that require more time to enter, the cost savings for the organization can be much greater. Hence, aspects of the present invention have the potential to greatly decrease the time needed for time card entries and therefore, provide significant accumulative cost savings for an organization.
Some current workforce management systems introduce capabilities to help speed-up the entry of time. For example, an employee may be offered the ability to use their last timecard as a template for entering their current timecard. This is useful if the employee typically performs the same work, week in and week out, and therefore his or her timecard is similar (if not identical) from week to week. This way the employee only needs to edit the entries that are not correct or need adjustment. The objective in this approach is to not have to create all the entries from scratch, but instead to review and edit an existing timecard from a prior period, and use that as a template for a new timecard period. Reviewing and editing the timecard are much quicker to do than creating the timecard entries from scratch.
Likewise, some workforce management systems can provide the user the ability to create and save a template with pre-populated time entries. For example, a user can create a template and retrieve the template at a later date as a starting point for their current timecard. Thus, employees can create timecard templates to represent certain types of work weeks that they may regularly perform. These templates can then be used at a later date to speed up data entry for a new timecard period. The problem with these approaches is that, as the user creates new timecards, it becomes difficult to manage which timecard template contains what timecard entry information.
Furthermore, some workforce management systems can auto-populate timecard data from the work schedule that an employee is meant to work. For example, if an employee's contract states that the employee must work a 40-hour week from Monday to Friday starting at 9 am and ending at 5 pm with a one hour lunch break at 12 pm each day, then this information can be used as a starting point for auto-populating the timecard. Further, some workforce management systems can auto-populate timecard data from scheduling systems. For example, input from a project scheduling system could be used to auto-populate a timecard depending on which projects an individual is meant to be working on that week. Nonetheless, each of these current solutions to time entry workforce management has significant shortcomings, and hence, improvements in the art are needed.